Looking for 2 hdd's, two different reasons for being.

[Andrew_Carr]

Well, it looks like one of my hard drives was corrupted recently, and I'm not sure I will be able to fix it. Also, my sister is going to be using my old amd athlon system to play the Sims 2(makes me cry) and to surf the web and do schoolwork.


I'm looking for help here though since I only know the difference between SATA, PATA, and SCSI, and since I know about rpm's and cache(barely) when it comes to hdd's. So I'm a bit of a newbie in this area, since i've only ever purchased one, and that was 5 years ago.

The general outline of what I need is-

Mine: I game and could use decent storage capacity. Mostly I'd go with performance over space, as I've been shackled with a 40gb hdd over the past 5 years and have learned to adapt. However, going from 5400rpm to 7200rpm 8mb cache would be a nice step up imo, as it would hopefully cut down on load times for CS:S and WoW.

Hers: The system she'll be using consists of 128mb of pc100 SDRAM(low, I know..) an amd 1700+thoroughbred A(wish it were a B) a pcchips mlr817 mobo(iirc) a cheapy raidmax 350w psu, and a basic ethernet/56k connection along with an fx5200(128mb). Slow, I know, but I'm hoping that it'll run Sims 2 well enough for her taste.


The price range for both drives is about the same. For my sister more storage space might be a better thing than pure performance. I'm looking at spending about 50-80$ on each drive. I plan on buying online, as the local B&M's pricegouge madly. I don't really have much of a preference to stores either. I've had good experiences with newegg, but recent stories against them seem to show a trend for the worse with that retailer. Monarch, zzf, chiefvalue, newegg, and any other reputable and cheap websites are what I'm looking for in terms of a retailer.

If anyone has any general suggestions, that'd be great. I probably won't be able to afford to buy the drives for another week, so any one day sales I'll unfortunately have to pass by



[Edit:] Oh! I almost forgot. My drive can be IDE or SATA, but i'd prefer SATA. The other needs to be IDE :/

 

[DougLite]

The sticky [thread=873523]thread[/thread] at the top of this forum has all the info you need...scroll a little bit to the budget recommendations. The first one is great for your sis, the second nearly perfect for you. Of the dealers you listed, ZZF is probably the best place to pick up HDDs.

The 80GB DeskStar will be a huge performance boost if you're still on 5400RPM, and for your sis, a Seagate Barracuda will still be ticking many years from now.

 

[Andrew_Carr]

Ok, thanks.

 

[Andrew_Carr]

Damn, budget just got slashed to 100$ Going to check out that sticky again.

 

[Andrew_Carr]

Oh, wow, nevermind. The deskstar you suggest is actually pretty cheap, much better price than I assumed it'd be.


http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=100590-1

Only 59$ with free 2nd day shipping(the less downtime the better, yay)


Checked out barracuda drives as well, and the ones i'm looking at(40gb iirc) were only 59$ as well. I think 80gb ones were like 10$ more, which seems about right.

Thanks for the advice again. I should be ordering them this Wednesday, and I'll report how things go.